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Designed exclusively for gun engagements, with five triple turrets mounting six-inch, forty-seven-caliber guns, the Helena had a full-load displacement of fourteen thousand tons—two thousand tons greater than that of a heavy cruiser. It was only her main battery that could be called light. Her six-inch projectiles, 130 pounds apiece, were half the weight of a heavy cruiser’s eight-inch ordnance. What her battery lacked in weight it made up for in rate of fire. Firing “semi-fixed” ammunition that held the powder charge with the projectile in a single case, the Helena’s fifteen guns were rated for ten rounds per minute, as against three or four for a heavy cruiser. The only factor that limited this furious pace, aside from the possibility that her magazines might become exhausted, was the risk that the gun barrels would warp from the heat.

The Helena’s gunnery officer, Commander Rodman D. Smith, built on the strong foundation of his predecessor, Irving T. Duke, who had told his crew on commissioning day at the New York Navy Yard in September 1939, “We want to be consistent. Not sensational, but consistent. All I ask—all I insist upon—is that we get a better than average percentage of hits every time. And to do that, we must know our guns.” Duke left the ship before she ever saw action, but his legacy endured. “The Helena never lost the inspiration he so gently pressed upon her in those early days of her schooling,” Chick Morris wrote.

Morris and two other ensigns, Ozzie Koerner and Sam Hollingsworth, joined the Helena at Espiritu Santo, their final stop on a month-and-a-half journey to the South Pacific in nine different ships. Coming aboard, they were so awestruck that they hardly noticed the assistant gunnery officer standing at the top of the brow, expecting a salute. Lieutenant Warren Boles caught the single-stripers gaping at the ship’s triple turrets, three forward—low, high, low—and two more aft. “Have you ever heard fifteen six-inch guns go off in unison?” he asked. The newcomers shook their heads. “It’s something to hear for the first time. Just be careful which way you jump.”

Veteran sailors worked hard to be nonchalant about the noggin-rattling impact of the Helena’s batteries, but a man’s nervous system couldn’t be rewired by will alone. “The whole ship is enveloped in one shattering blast of noise, and you jump like hell,” wrote Morris. During gunnery exercises, the crew in the radio shack learned to transcribe the five-character blocks of the encoded fleet radio broadcasts while leaning down on their typewriters, the better to keep them from jumping off their desks.

For the Helena and her cohorts in Task Force 64, there was little time for rehearsing combat. Single-day exercises were “too short a time to justify any hope of obtaining adequate tactical unity in a newly organized force,” Admiral King wrote. Gunnery exercises were dangerous business. Accidental explosions of mishandled powder in turrets and hoists took a fearful toll in life. To minimize the risks during peacetime, the drills were carefully scripted, from the number of firing passes each ship made, to which batteries fired and when, to what speeds the ships made. In night exercises, ships towing the target sleds obligingly kept their searchlights trained on the firing ships, just so there were no tragic mistakes. With the location of targets brightly revealed at all times, the potential for confusion—and realism—was written right out of the script.

Eliminating confusion and danger in peacetime exercises was understandable. Eliminating realism and danger during wartime exercises was unforgivable. A low-order schism had developed on Admiral Nimitz’s staff centered on this divide. “His training section was constantly fighting the operations section,” one of his staff officers, Ernest M. Eller, recalled. The goal of the training section was to maximize the proficiency of crews in battle. “Operations,” on the other hand, “saw the world as a series of times